Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory/Revue canadienne de theorie politique et sociale, Vol. 5, Nos. 1-2 (Winter/ Spring, 1981) .
CULTURAL STUDIES AND COMMON SENSE
Alan O'Connor
Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, London and New York: Methuen, 1979, and John Clarke, Chas Critcher, Richard Johnson, Working-Class Culture: Studies in History and Theory, London: Hutchinson, 1979.
Two recent publications from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, at the University of Birmingham, provide further evidence of the "linguistic turn" in social and cultural studies. An important part of this phenomenon is the reformulation of methodological principles in terms of members' communicative competences. In North America, for example, "contextual" folklore studies make a strong case for granting the everyday expressions of social groups their own intelligibility . I In terms of a different tradition, if Frazer's Golden Bough pours scorn on certain rites of dawn, Wittgenstein, in an obscure text that has recently been reprinted, observes that "towards morning, when the sun is about to rise, people celebrate rites of the coming of the day, but not at night, for then they simply burn lamps."2 Long after Frazer's Golden Bough, intellectual writers have been notoriously overconfident that they have understood the meaning and foolishness of the artistic communication and everyday rituals of different social groups. Cultural studies inherits, in the works of Raymond Williams, many thoughtful passages on exactly this problem. The speaking voice and the dancing body that the student of contemporary culture encounters are, Williams insists, already interpreted as part of an ordinary conversation or the everyday organization of the dance. In a passage of The Long Revolution he writes : "the emphasis that matters is that there are, essentially, no `ordinary' activities, if by `ordinary' we mean the absence of creative interpretation and effort."3 The published papers ofcultural studies are the result ofan encounter between its own organized discourse and the everyday understandings of native actions and experiences. The theme of the authenticity of everyday experience is part and parcel of the work of E .P. Thompson, who has also had a major influence on cultural studies :
I would have to say that the historian has got to be listening all the time. He should not set up a book or a 183 ALAN O'CONNOR
research project with a totally clear sense of exactly what he is going to be able to do. The material itself has got to speak through him. And I think that this happens.4
A major emphasis in Thompson's recent essay on "The Poverty of Theory" is the long tradition of historical activities and the accumulated skills within the discipline for "listening" to the historian's sources.s The emphasis on experience assumes what Williams calls a "knowable community,"6 in part a historical phenomenon and in part a literary convention:
We have only to read a George Eliot novel to see the difficulty of the coexistence, within one form, of an analytically conscious observer of conduct with a developed analytic vocabulary, and of people represented as living and speaking in customary ways . . . There is a new kind of break in the texture of the novel, an evident failure of continuity between the necessary language of the novelist and the recorded language of many of the characters.?
The asymmetry between the language of the observer and the oral traditions he or she inscribes is not confined to the novel. A similar distance is found in nineteenth-century social and statistical investigation. Williams contrasts the different methods of Mayhew's and Charles Booth's studies of the London poor:
Mayhew is often now preferred, and he is indeed more readable and more accessible. His studies were based on direct contacts with people, telling their own stories in their own words, and though he set out to cover the whole range systematically, and often checked his findings with those he was writing about, his mode of vision belonged to an earlier world, before the scale of the problem and the sustained consideration of systematic remedies had altered social vision.$
There is no such mode of vision in Booth's work. His method of impersonal and systematic tabulation does not assume a "knowable community ." He treats the poor as objects of study, but as Williams points out, statistical and
184 CULTURAL THEORY analytic methods may be necessary in order to fully understand the complexities of a capitalist social formation, such as that of London at the turn of the century. One of the arguments for the New Left Review's systematic introduction of European "marxisms" and other bodies ofthinking, was that British marxism in the 1960's lacked the necessary "concepts and categories with which to analyze its own society."9 The extent to which British marxism has come to recognize itself by the use of certain concepts and categories (mode of production, surplus value, ideological, political and economic "instances") challenges the cultural studies tradition of valuing lived experience. The present dilemma of cultural studies is to find methods which do not simply assume a "knowable community," but which also recognize that such shared experience ought not be carelessly appropriated. There is an ambiguity, for example, in the recent approach of cultural studies to youth subcultures. The boundaries of Resistance Through Rituals are set by drawing upon marxist theoretical work that conceptualizes class and ideology in an extremely sophisticated way. This theoretical work distinguishes the approach of cultural studies to youth subcultures, from that of the sociology of leisure, or writings on the seemingly universal problems of youth. Yet there are enormous practical and social differences between this theoretical work and the everyday discourse of those whom it singles out as constituting a field for study. This dichotomy remains largely unconfronted and it is not surprising that more recent publications by members of the Birmingham Centre go in such different directions. Hebdige's book on subcultural style opts for a highly worked semiological presentation of punk style. On the other hand, the studies in working class history and theory edited by Clarke, Critcher and Johnson are informed by a theoretical orientation which makes it possible to begin to think through the relation between their textual work, and the spoken and written style of those about whom they write.
H Dick Hebdige's book, Subculture: the Meaning ofStyle, is a product ofthe encounter between present-day cultural studies and youth subcultures, especially punk in Britain . It celebrates the expressive moment ofpunk before it was reduced to a fashion in music and clothes, or to "deviance" and good fun. Following Barthes in Writing Degree Zero, Hebdige interprets that moment as a zero degree of subcultural style, analogous to the white writing of the nouveau roman in France . In other words, punk is not simply another style of youth subculture, but for one intoxicating moment challenges the apparent naturalness and boundaries of any style: racial, sexual or historical. The argument is made by contrasting punk with other subcultural 185 ALAN O'CONNOR styles, those ofthe teddy boys, mods, rockers, and skinheads. The skinheads, for example, had a positive style in that they attempted to recreate in the "mob" an idealized version of traditional working class community . 10 The rolled shirt sleeves, working boots emphasized by jeans that were not quite long enough, and the overt masculine sexism, contributed to the skinheads' remembrance of a community that no longer exists as it used to be. A major theme of Hebdige's book is the mediated response of youth subcultures to the growing black presence in Britain :
The proximity of the two positions - working class youth and negro - invites identification and even when this identity is repressed or openly resisted, black cultural forms (e.g. music) continue to exercise a major determining influence over the development of each subcultural style (p. 73) .
Black Jamaican music, reggae, and Rastafarianism in Britain affected the emergence of punk. The whites were soon left by the wayside, however, as the black patois became more strident and the religious themes of the Rasta movement became clearer. Another important strand in Hebdige's book is the relation between punk style and the tenor of the respectable media in Britain :
The punks appropriated the rhetoric of crisis which had filled the airwaves and the editorials throughout the period and translated it into tangible (and visible) terms. In the gloomy, apocalyptic ambience of the late 1970's - with massive unemployment, with the ominous violence of the Notting Hill Carnival, Grunwick, Lewisham and Ladywood - it was fitting that the punks should present themselves as `degenerates'; as signs of the highly publicized decay which perfectly represented the atrophied condition of Great Britain (p. 87).
Punk ensembles subverted the media's language of crisis. Clearly Hebdige's use of the zero degree of style theme is grounded in history and actual social practices to a greater extent than Barthes's work on writing style. In Writing Degree Zero the argument extends from pre- Classical literature to Camus and beyond, without ever explicitly dealing with any one style in the detail promised by the opening lines:
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Hebert, the revolutionary, never began a number of his news sheet. Le Pere Duchene without introducing a sprinkling of obscenities . These improprieties had no real meaning, but they had significance. In what way? In that they expressed a whole revolutionary situation."
The details of social history and culture that Hebdige includes, function within his argument solely to show that punkers are "different" . For Hebdige, the punker's only identity is that he or she is symbolically not the same as members of other social groupings. The punker's integrity is only in the homology between punk dance, clothes, music, musicians, decorations - all of which represent a zero degree of style. Punk is a symbolic challenge to a symbolic order (p. 92). Hebdige's understanding of the nature of the symbolic order draws from the Birmingham Centre's earlier work on subcultures. In Resistance Through Rituals, the relation between the lifeworld and oral traditions of different groups, and the organized discourse of the agencies of middle class "hegemony" is written about as a matter of winning or losing "space". Working class subcultures are considered to win "space" within middle class hegemony. The metaphor was no doubt suggested by the fact that some ofthe groups actually do struggle to control certain physical areas: streets, pubs, and open areas. One also suspects the influence of the spatial image lying behind Althusser's formulations on different levels of practice - Ideological, Political and Theoretical. But the spatial model, in whatever form, is inadequate for the task of thinking through the lived contact of verbalized subcultures with teachers' talk, policemen's warnings, journalists' reports in print, coverage on the media - and not least, with cultural studies as a teaching and publishing institution. The sophisticated understanding by Raymond Williams and others, 1 z of the literary nature of cultural studies is today only being gradually realized. The world for Hebdige, however, is a symbolicplace.His book is framed by the metaphors of Genet's prison-house, and punk by its unlocatedness (p. 120) .The only symbolic action of subcultures is apparently that of bricolage, whereby materials are desituated and relocated side by side, to make something new. His conclusion is that: "The subcultural styles which we have been studying, like prison graffiti, merely pay tribute to the place in which they were produced . . ." (p. 136). In spite of his "linguistic turn" Hebdige's world is not one where people speak and write. Put another way, he is the only one who is allowed to write. If style is imagined to be a ghostly mantle passed silently from social collectivity to social collectivity, it is little wonder if from under it there echoes only a hollow laugh.
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In the project of Working-Class Culture: Studies in history and theory is a profound sense ofthe historian's responsibility to the livid experiences about which he writes. The spatial metaphor for cultural hegemony is discarded and replaced by a new interpretation of Gramsci that stresses speech and textual communities. The argument is most explicit in Richard Johnson's essay, "Three Problematics : elements of a theory ofworking-class culture." Johnson starts by pointing out the limitations of the classical marxist texts for an account of culture and ideology. He reviews the practical achievements and limitations of the histories of culture of Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson on the one hand, and the theoretical work of Althusser and structuralist marxists on the other. Finally, he suggests that Gramsci's formulations on the diversity of political action, class, subjectivity, "common- sense," and language meet at least some of the structuralist protocols, while retaining the culturalist interest in lived experience. Johnson's interpretation of "hegemony" breaks with the usage of Resistance Through Rituals by no longer being conceptualized as the attribute of a class. In another version of the same argument, Johnson succinctly describes how in place of "culture" or "ideology" Gramsci employs three terms:
. . . `common-sense' which refers, concretely, to the lived culture of a particular class or social group; `philosophy' (or sometimes `ideology') which refers to an organized set of conceptions with a more or less transformative relation to lived culture; and `hegemony' which describes the state of play, as it were, between the whole complex of ,educative' institutions and ideologies on the one hand, and lived culture on the other . . .13
Although differences in political effectivity between organized "philosophies" and the worlds of common sense exist, all persons are philosophers to the extent that they employ language, share ways of seeing and doing things, and have opinions and beliefs. 14 Johnson does not claim to' have solved the problem of Gramsci's alleged historicism . The extent to which hegemony is organized by a principle which articulates all the other elements of the ideological practice remains a dilemma, so that it is the expression of a fundamental class, 15 and the extent to which the establishment of a degree of hegemony changes the hegemonic discourse, as the educators are themselves educated. If Johnson does not answer the Althusserian demand for a scientific marxism, he is able to reformulate its notion of theoretical work. An 188 CULTURAL THEORY organized discourse necessarily takes on some of the "good enough for all practical purposes" character of the local understandings that characterize common sense, because that discourse becomes the common sense of a group of the intelligentsia. "Empiricism" (Althusser's bete noire) is then reformulated as a lack of attention to this shared common sense. The nature of these working understandings cannot be known a priori by a structuralist analysis, but is a matter for actual investigation . 16 The project which Johnson suggests for cultural studies, then, is the study in detail of the relationships among organized "philosophies," politics, and lived common sense. As is often the case, the analysis of educational institutions raises issues ofthe relation between organized discourse and the conversations of everyday life. Johnson's thought-provoking essay, " `Really useful knowledge': radical education and working class culture, 1790-1848," explores: . . . "the relation between various kinds ofradicalism, understood as `educative' or transformative ideologies, and the conditions of existence and lived culture of some of the groups which radicalism addressed" (p. 76). Johnson documents the attempts by working class artisans to substitute really useful education for the "provided" education of the Sunday schools, distributors of tracts and Mechanics Institutes. The essay's refusal to avoid difficult questions is a reminder that "provided" education is as poor for us today as it was for nineteenth-century radicals. If we really understand what Johnson is saying about certain nineteenth-century educational networks, this comprehension must alter our conception of the possibilities of educational practice today. The radical educational pursuits that he describes were not separated out from the ordinary lifeworld. "The typical forms," he notes, "were improvised, haphazard and therefore ephemeral, having little permanent existence beyond the more immediate needs of individuals and groups" (p. 79). The educational resources of the family, neighbourhood and place of work lay beyond the control of the institutions of "provided" education . Once acquired, the reading habit needed only some kind of fellowship - the workshop experience seems to have been important - in order to survive. Occasionally, on top of these indigenous educational resources radical educational institutions developed: discussion groups, facilities for newspapers in pubs and coffee houses, Chartist or Owenite branches, travelling lecturers and, of course, the radical press. Johnson interprets the dual effect of the influence of family and friends, and of radical institutions, as forming an educational "network." Drawing upon Gramsci, he suggests that we consider the journalists, demagogues, organizers and "educators" of radical movements - especially Chartists and Owenites - as constituting political parties or proto-parties (pp-92-3). Johnson writes quite frankly that:
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We do not really know how to `think' the `circuit' of such effects: from the conditions from which radical theory arose in the first place, through the educational practices themselves, to success or failure in actually forming people's principles of life and action (p. 91).
Patrica Hollis' formulations in The Pauper Press on the accumulation of a textual repertoire by nineteenth-century radicals suggest the possible usefulness here of the notion of folklore "conduits." In recent legend theory, the "conduit" is held to be the lifeworld and socio-linguistic relations of those who debate certain beliefs. Attention is thereby gained for the multiple generic traditions (both spoken and published) through which such arguments are actually conducted . 17 The processes that interest Johnson - the relationship between organized discourses and everyday speech and action - are often extraordinarily difficult to document. Several of the essays in Working-Class Culture open up historical topics for further investigation by contrasting the institutional aspects of such "networks" as they existed in two different periods. Careful examination of such institutions seems to indicate that the indigenous experience/ organized culture ratio changed in youth associations and in the provision of leisure from the early twentieth-century to the period after the second world war. The essays by Michael Blanch, Paul Wild and Chas Critcher, present the necessary historical groundwork for further research into how these changes in cultural "networks" were actually experienced by those who were caught up in them. The thoughtful analysis of what modern folklorists call "memorates" (anecdotes, reminiscences, life stories), collected from those who lived through the period, could well provide a useful starting place for this further research. Michael Blanch's essay on youth organizations at the turn of the twentieth- century in Birmingham and Manchester starts with a briefpresentation ofthe oral traditions and subcultural life of children of unskilled and semi-skilled workers at the end of the nineteenth-century. The remainder of his essay contrasts this indigenous culture with the extraordinary variety of youth organizations that attempted to direct the leisure of working class youths, and girls to a lesserextent, into "respectable channels." He demonstrates that these organizations aimed in particular organize the children of unskilled and semi-skilled workers in the centre of the cities, thereby facilitating their mobilization at the time of the nation's greatest need : the first wofd,war. The next essay notes that the festival of Rushbearing, indigenous to many north-western English towns, had by 1900 in Rochdale become only a name "to refer to an increasingly commercial week of fairs, railway excursions and holidays" (pp. 277-8, n. 32). This point sets the theme of Paul Wild's
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"Recreation in Rochdale, 1900-1940," although his essay traces more subtle changes than merely the erosion of Rushbearing Week, a festival that dated back to before the Reformation. Wild deals with changes from the provision of leisure by the churches and chapels, co-operative and other societies, circuses and travelling cinema shows, to the provision of leisure by capitalist enterprises such as commercial dance halls and chain cinema companies . The older forms of leisure were localized and class or group based. Later capitalized forms were removed from any kind of popular control. Wild warns about drawing any simple conclusion from this fact:
. . . commercialized activities and commodities them- selves are often re-appropriated by their `consumers' as a sort of raw material for further cultural work. One cannot `read off' (as mass culture theorists have tended to) the use and indigenous meanings of mass-produced messages or objects.
There is need for further research on how newer forms ofleisure provision are used and understood within the mundane lifeworld of a class or group . Much of the fascination of Chas Critcher's fluent essay on "Football since the war" derives from his own interest in the soccer world . He deals in turn with the player, supporter, the effects of the mass media and international soccer. His discussion of the player gives a feel for the thrust of his argument. The professional footballer was traditionally a kind of working-class hero, barely removed from the economic and cultural background of those who paid to watch him. The abolition of the maximum wage for soccer players in 1960 marked a victory in their collective struggle to improve their situation. Life has changed for the new generation of star performers:
The emphasis must be on `everyday life'. It was not just a question of footballers having gained the right to more money and more bargaining power in relation to their employing club. What became gradually clear was that the `new deal' had fractured the set of social and cultural relationships by which the player's identity had previously been structured (p. 163).
Critcher convincingly develops this theme throughout the essay: financial and contractual elements have changed the experience of the game today. Yet, as he also takes care to stress, contractual relationships have not simply replaced subcultural ones: "the loyalties of the existant footballing sub-culture are not ALAN O'CONNOR
easily turned into the vagaries of consumerism. No Aston Villa supporter goes to Birmingham City except to support the away team" (p. 183). Paul Willis' essay on shop floor culture returns us to the themes of Johnson's "Really useful knowledge ." For both scholars history can be separated from ethnographic understanding only by silencing those whose speech is most vulnerable. The very choice of shopfloor culture as a topic is, in addition, a challenge to the separation of lived experience and a marxist analysis of production. For Willis, as for Williams in Marxism and Literature, there is no question of counterposing the `cultural' with the `productive' or the `real,' as if the first had no actual constitutive role in the basic social relations which govern the form of our society (p. 186). Willis writes that "culture is the very material of our daily lives" (pp. 185-6). We are back to the field of useful knowledge. Shopfloor culture is dominated by what Willis describes as the sheer mental and physical bravery of doing difficult work in hostile conditions (p. 189). There are many layers of meaning in this description. First, is the "mechanical, sensuous and concrete familiarity with the tools of production" (p. 191) . Then, there is a "profound air of competence in the culture of the shop floor, a competence which always exists prior to the particular situation" (p. 191).. Another aspect is competence with elaborate verbal and gestural exchanges: repartee, jokes, kiddings -the focus of industrial folklore studies in North America. is All of this shopfloor culture, all of this know-how, is above allpractical knowledge: what you need to get through the job. Willis' essay itself is a practical piece of work, a clear challenge to the bad faith of uncritical ethnographics of the workplace experience in modern capitalism. Throughout the essay there are connexions made between the experience of manual labour and a certain sexual logic: "It's a man's want to be finished when he starts a job." (p. 197) . Union organizers can work up and use such cultural forms:
Certainly the union official or the shop steward uses particular shopfloor cultural forms to mobilize `the lads' - the spectacle or bluff, or strong and combative language which are suffused with masculine feelings. This establishes a real expression of anger and opposition which may be very effective in the short term, and is certainly a force to be reckoned with (p. 198).
Willis holds this radical (albeit selective) use of workshop cultural forms, against the fetish of the wage packet, that tight-gummed compact brown envelope, a symbol of machimiso which "dictates the domestic culture and economy and tyrannizes both men and women" (p . 197).
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The essay by Pam Taylor on domestic service between the wars, argues that the rearing of working class girls in their homes prepared them for a life in service and thus in one sense mothers contributed to the exploitation of their daughters. The domestic servants' feelings of inferiority, along with their loss of frequent contact with family and friends, contrasts sharply with the form of masculine shopfloor culture described by Willis. The two introductory essays for Working-Class Culture display the contributors' reflexive awareness ofthe textual tradition in which their studies are inscribed. The reader should consider the lists of key texts included in both essays as a request that the present work be read in the context ofwhat is best in the published traditions there assembled . These essays by Chas Critcher and Richard Johnson comprise respectively a series of succinct commentaries on key sociological and historical studies. Their remarks argue for the heterogeneity or complexity of "working class culture," for the impossibility of separating culture and economic production, and for the authenticity of experience. In addition, a clear understanding of the educative and transformative purpose of their own writing is present :
Is it not the responsibility of historians, especially socialist historians, to extend the emphasis of the new history forward in time, to complete the reconstruction of labour history, to realize the promise of oral history, to reconstruct, once more, the real connection between historians of the left and a socialist movement (pp . 65-6).
Much more is involved here than any vague sense of building on the work of past historians. Take for example, Johnson's treatment of G.D.H. Cole's labour histories . He is critical because Cole "remained completely oblivious of culture as the common sense of classes and social groups" (p. 53). Nevertheless, Johnson's account of Cole is superb, because it integrates a sense of political situation, intellectual project, and the choice of a particular narrative form in which Cole wrote his books. Johnson's essay also deals with issues in more recent writings . He suggests that one way out of the current structuralist-culturalist impasse is to: ". . . slow the pace of speculation a little, be less destructively critical and consider the strengths and weaknesses of the two traditions by comparing some exemplary texts" (p. 70). Such philosophical common sense opens new directions for thought and research in a debate which has all too often been tedious and destructive . The concluding essay of Working-Class Culture is by John Clarke. His "Capital and culture: the post-war working class revisited" argues the urgency
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of grasping the interconnexions between the broad movements of capital and the experience of localized cultures. It is necessary to analyse the changes in the organization of capital that replace, for example, the self-assured, patronizing boss with the management scientists whose university training, erodes skills and pours scorn on the world of "experience" (p. 248). Even if Clarke occasionally falls back on certain of Althusser's formulations (for example, pp . 245, 252), the urgency of his task makes his essay of considerable value, both as an overview of a remarkable and innovative book, and as a place for further thought and research.
Department of Sociology York University
Notes
1 . Dell Hymes, "Folklore's Nature and the Sun's Myth," Journal of American Folklore 88 (1975), pp. 345-369 . 2. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Frazer's "Golden Bough", trans. A.C . Miles, ed. Rush Rhees, Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey : Humanities Press, 1979, p. 12e . 3. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution, London : Chatto & Windus, 1961, p . 37. 4. "Interview with Edward Thompson," Radical History Review, 1976, p. 15. Cited by Richard Johnson, "Edward Thompson, Eugene Genovese, and Socialist-Humanist History," History Workshop Journal No. 6 (1978), p. 84. 5. In The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, New York and London : Monthly Review Press, 1978 . 6. As well as the next reference see Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters, London : New Left Books, 1979, pp. 170-172 . 7. Raymond Williams, The Countrv and the City, St. Albans : Paladin, 1975, p. 207 . 8. Ibid, p. 267 . 9. Perry Anderson, "Components of the National Culture," New Left Review 50 (1968), p. 50 . 10. John Clarke, "The Skinheads and the Magical Recovery of Community," in S. Hall et . al., Resistance Through Rituals, London : Hutchinson, 1978, p. 99 . 11 . Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith, New York : Hill and Wang, 1968, p. 1 . 12. Richard Hoggard, The Uses of Literacy, Harmondsworth : Penguin, 1958 . 13. Richard Johnson, "Histories of Culture/ Theories of Ideology : Notes on an Impasse," in Ideology and Cultural Production, Michele Barrett, Philip Corrigan, Annette Kuhn and Janet Wolf (eds), London : Croom Helm, 1979, p. 74 . The corresponding passage in the present work is on p. 233 . 14. Antonio Gramsci, Selectionsfrom the Prison Notebooks, trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, New York: International Publishers, 1971, p. 323 . 15. Chantal Mouffe, "Hegemony and Ideology in Gramsci;" in her (ed) Gramsci and Marxist Theory, London : Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979, p. 194 .
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16. Alexander McHoul, "The Practical Methodology of Reading in Science and Everyday Life : Reading Althusser Reading Marx, "Philosophy ofthe Social Sciences 10 (1980), pp. 129-150. This article should be read in the light of John O'Neill's work on the social phenomenology of discourse communities . See his, "The Literary Production of Natural and Social Science Inquiry : Issues and Applications in The Social Organization of Science," The Canadian Journal of Sociology, vol. 6 (Spring 1981); "The Mutuality of Accounts : An Essay on Trust," in Scott G. McNall (ed) Theoretical Perspectives in Sociology, New York : St. Martin's Press, 1979, pp. 369-380 . 17. Linda D6gh and Andrew Vazsonyi, "The Hypothesis of Multi-Conduit Transmission in Folklore," in Folklore : Performance and Communication, ed. Dan Ben-Amos and Kenneth S. Goldstein, The Hague: Mouton, 1973. 18. Western Folklore XXXVII (July 1978), special issue on "Working Americans: Contemporary Approaches to Occupational Folklife," (ed) Robert H . Byington .